O-Town: Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Flora's Coffee House
We return now to Renata, forty minutes late and cruising down Bronson Avenue defeated and dusty from her off-road adventure along the O-train tracks.
If only she had some O-Town right now, it would calm the hot, electric anger directed at passing cars but mostly at herself for waking up late, having faith in Ottawa transit, having faith in anything at all in this godforsaken city.
She arrives at Flora’s Coffee House at precisely 9:15am. The small café is in an apartment-complex basement at the corner of Flora and Bronson. Renata goes around to the back of the building, wrangles her bike down three flights of concrete stairs and leaves it in the narrow hallway that is considered the Flora breakroom.
In she pushes to the café’s storeroom/office and finds Sandra at her computer, tapping her fingers on the plastic table.
“Lee’s sick I need you on dishes,” says Sandra without looking up.
Renata can see she is staring at spreadsheets and groans.
“I’m really sorry, my alarm didn’t go off—”
“Let’s talk about it later.”
Renata grabs an apron from the back of yet another door, this one going out to the café itself. The ceiling is low, the floor is dirt, there are only the smallest of windows high up on the walls, but Flora’s Coffee House is always packed, sometimes with lines winding up the main stairs from the apartment building’s lobby. Besides the free drip-coffee refills, Sandra has curated a particular type of barista, one who might peer at a customer’s hand and tell them to avoid the beach for the next two weeks. Another might put just the right amount of home-made Flora Spice MixTM into your latte, on a hunch that you need an extra pick me up.
Then there are the exotic, shade loving plants that Sandra has acquired over the years since working at botanic gardens across England. They practically cover the walls, vining this way and that, or growing so large in enormous pots, café patrons joke that Sandra’s hostas provide them with more privacy than their cubicles at work.
These are how Sandra makes her real money. Once a month, in the wee hours of the morning, a man in dirt-encrusted overalls holding an oblong briefcase will knock in a very specific sequence before entering his key and unlocking the door.
He will leave with a heavier briefcase but lighter wallet, and be out of the country before the sun is up. Sandra’s plants are very popular among the American bunker set.
Renata greets some regulars with nods and gets to work bussing tables and loading the dishwasher. She slips behind Oila, the barista on cash, and grabs an O-Town out of the mini-fridge. Sandra, bless her, always keeps a few on hand. There are now a few customers who will only order O-Town.
“What’s new Larry,” Renata asks the thin balding man at the bar staring into space. Two empty mugs sit alongside his heavy laptop.
“Just trying to come up with a better nickname for our arsonist than the Firebomber. It sounds too cool.”
“What’ve they done now?”
“Set fire to those two affordable housing developments in Bayshore area. And I just got a tip from an OC Transpo cleaner that someone tried to blow up their bus depot. No ID on the culprit though.”
“You sure it’s not multiple people?”
“MO is the same, arsonist apparently makes a fire out of mostly paper and plywood near some kind of fuel on site. What do you think of The Pyro of Nepean?”
“Are they from Nepean?”
Larry turns back to his laptop.
“Well, no. Nobody knows actually.”
Renata pats his shoulder.
“You’ll think of something.”
The café fills, humming along with the espresso machine and dishwasher and bang of metal milk jugs on the counter, and the exhalations of standstill cars in never ending traffic. Two more baristas arrive for their shift, and Oila and Renata retire to the breakroom.
“I heard you’ve got a special guest at the Orange Club tonight.”
Oila is from the Independent Principality of Fort McMurray, born to parents who had never heard of Newton’s third law. As a consequence, the small, red-headed teenager with the will of a bullet left her parent’s house the minute she turned eighteen, became completely bilingual and a self-described eco-terrorist. She had somehow procured solar panels for her 46th storey balcony and refused to eat Albertan beef. Renata always found Oila an overwhelming conversation partner, in part due to her youthful zeal, and her tendency to casually theorize battle plans for the Alberta border skirmishes in the north.
“Some South American President I think?”
“Bolivia, I heard. He’s really cool. Just passed a law to ban all foreign mining companies. I thought you were all over this stuff?”
The election had happened three months ago, Renata remembers now. She used to volunteer with the South American Coalition Against Imperialism—her father’s family was from Peru. But she hasn’t been seeing them as much lately. They’d started holding with exiled socialist politicians and strategizing about support efforts. A small part of her insisted that she had in fact, been instrumental in this occurrence, but the rest of her mind was convinced she would never do so, it was too risky.
She couldn’t afford to take too many risks these days. She has a decent apartment now, and the Orange Club is a good, stable gig, even though, Renata frowns now, she can’t exactly remember how either of them came about.
“You guys need any help tonight?” says Oila, snapping Renata out of her reverie.
“I don’t think so. Sorry.”
Oila sighs. She takes a sip of her turmeric cardamom mocha latte, her own concoction.
“It would be so cool to get good and close to those fuckers,” she says.
“See, that’s why you probably don’t even get called,” Renata points out, pushing off the hallway wall and heading back into the café, “management doesn’t want any of their staff throwing Molotov cocktails at the guests.”
Oila rolls her eyes.
“It’d just be a diuretic in the coffee or something.”
The café is quieter now. The work-from-home crowd will soon depart and the artists with nowhere to go will slink in for happy hour and the half-hearted goal of working on their latest projects instead of passing out at the counter.
Sandra’s door is now ajar and Renata takes the opportunity to slip in. Sandra is busy to behind the boulder of her desk and its many accoutrements. She points at her laptop when she sees Renata.
“I’ve done as much as I can. Please finish up with payroll.”
She sweeps out of the room without so much as a glance to her erstwhile friend. There is no other option; Renata must show her remorse for the many delays and tricks of fate through her actions, not her words. Increasingly, she finds this difficult to do.
Nevertheless, she gets behind the desk and begins even to input various numbers to various columns, idly nursing her O-Town, until, all too soon, her attention is dulled by the harrumphing of the furnace, the rush of sound from the water pipes. Sandra’s office chair is padded and soft compared even to Renata’s own bed. The door is almost shut, cutting off only but the shrillest of chortles from Sandra as she chats with the incoming circus of painters and poets. All too quickly, all too willingly, Renata falls asleep.
She was awoken after only a brief slumber by a knocking on the door by Oila, giving her a chance to catch her pooling spit and dash a few more numbers off before Oila came in and announced it was closing.
“I’m almost done, but, Oila, you went to business school, right? You know about this stuff?”
“Briefly, only to take them down from the inside,” Oila says, her eyes avoiding Renata’s.
“Well, anyway, can you look this over? I’d feel better if I had another pair of eyes on it.”
Oila acquiesced somewhat reluctantly. Sandra had told her that Renata had recently implemented a whole new system to deal with her expenses and income, one that Oila had not yet had a chance to penetrate. The laptop screen glimmered with unfamiliar formulae.
Renata, looking at her phone, quickly concludes that she is now running late for her second job and makes to leave, but not before Sandra can grab her with a questioning look and more kindness in her eyes than she’d seen all day.
“Thank you for doing that, I hate giving you the tough love treatment Ren, but I really needed that done.”
“I know,” says Renata, “And I’ve been thinking, I am really not what you need on this stuff. I think Oila is better equipped to help out.”
“Oila is one of my best baristas,” says Sandra.
“And she will be your next best accountant,” exclaims Renata, with a flick of her wrist, “I’d love to stay on, really I would, but I’m so busy right now, with the new job and…and the new apartment, I can’t commit to this anymore.”
“So, you’re quitting.”
Renata purses her lips. Sandra is looking far, far more disappointed than she’d expected given the earlier cold shoulder. In fact, Sandra looks almost as if by doing her this favour, Renata is in fact letting her down!
“Sandra this is for the best, I know it. You don’t need me, I’m not that good, and Oila needs the money more.”
Sandra says nothing. There is only the susurration of plants sucking water out of the air. Renata wonders for a moment if Sandra will keep fighting her, but instead, she is greeted with a look of utter resignation. Is there even a hint of pity in Sandra’s deep brown eyes?
“If that’s what you want.”
“It really is. I’ll see you around Sandra. We’ll get lunch sometime soon.”
“Sure we will Ren,” says Sandra, who has already turned her back on a once true friend, to go to her office and help Oila acquaint herself with her additional duties.
We leave Renata Tsing for the moment, as she tugs her bike out of the crawl space in the hallway of the apartment building and pedals out into the fading light. True politics occur in warm, velvety rooms and via softly lit telephone calls. We are witnesses only, but we endeavour to witness them all.